The Nippon Ham Fighters are my new favorite baseball team.  Do you think they fight with ham, or against ham?

Let the ham beware!

I now know exactly how I’m going to spend all of my time in Tokyo.

The best trailer ever… if only I knew ANY Japanese. Via Yes But No But Yes.

CNN: “The suicides are seen as part of a spate of detergent-related deaths that experts say have been encouraged by Internet suicide sites since last summer.”

JapanesePornMusement. (NSFW)

Narita Airport’s “Fun Contents” aren’t all that fun, though I would be interested in seeing Sakura no Yama Park’s 5,300 shrubs.

Why doesn’t Google Maps give me the option to see a foreign map labeled with latin-based characters? This map doesn’t help me (though it is good to know that I’m still able to find a nearby 7-Eleven).

Professional baseball teams in Japan are split into two leagues, and one has the DH!

Crime statistics in Japan seem more interesting than in America:

Violent crimes are relatively rare in Japan, where most shootings and stabbings are committed by the nation’s “yakuza” crime syndicates. However, street violence was up 4.6 percent in the first half of 2007, according to the National Police Agency’s latest crime report. Nearly 55 percent of murder cases during the same period involved swords and knives, while guns accounted for just 2.4 percent of the killings, the police agency reported.

How can they give a stat like that and not break down the sword/knife category? Is 54% knives and 1% swords? Or 54% swords?

Man, I want to go to Japan.

I have no idea what this is, but it’s weird:

An odd Japanese commercial featuring Brad Pitt. It seems like it was shot on a cell phone and written by a 14 year-old.

Wikipedia and UFO Evidence point out an interesting story, the Battle of Los Angeles.

On February 23, 1942 something appeared in the night sky over Los Angeles.  At the time the army thought it was a Japanese airship of some sort and attempt to shoot it down.  That didn’t work all that well; all 1400 shells fired into the air missed the target.  Over time people decided that it was a wayward weather balloon or a Japanese fire balloon (or a UFO, if you’re into that sort of thing).

The above picture was from the LA Times’s cover story which included a recap of the evening and a nice shout out to Culver City:

There is also a larger object which remains stationary for some time, then, when lightened by the projectors above Culver City, starts to move at a constant speed of 100 km/h in the direction of the Santa Monica cost, and later southwards in direction of Long Beach, where it goes out of sight.

Those spotlights don’t just get used for fancy Hollywood premieres, sometimes they use them to shoot down UFOs.

UPDATE: When I told the robots to post this a few days ago, it felt unique.  In between when the robots were sent on their merry way and the actual posting, Neatorama linked to information about an upcoming re-enactment of the event at the Fort MacArthur Museum.  Go to it.

I just downloaded the original, Japanese version of Super Mario Brothers II (the Lost Levels) for the Wii. I’ve heard that it was hard, but I was somewhat dismayed when I got to this point in the game:

And this one wasn’t much better (I just came out of the pipe and cannot go back down):

In reality both of the above situations provided a means of escape.  The really dismaying point to get to was this one:

This warp zone provides a really mean-spirited choice: you can either warp backwards from 3-1 to 1-1 (who would do that?) or you can off yourself in the provided bottomless pit (but remain at level 3-1). This choice becomes even easier when you consider that this version of Super Mario Brothers provides the ability to continue at the “-1″ board of your current level if you run out of lives. There’s no situation in which you would chose to go back to world 1-1, you’ll always choose the pit.

It’s one thing for a game to construct a level in which you’ll most likely die, it’s another to contrive a situation in which suicide is the only viable choice.

Another weird thing about this Warp Zone — there’s multiple ways to get to it. Every time you find a new path through the board (going through a pipe, climbing a vine, vaulting over the flagpole) you’re initially excited about the possibility of a new ending, only to realize that you’re back at the same suicide point.

Miyamoto’s got a sadistic streak.

For those of you who didn’t browse through all my Ireland pictures, here’s one of the more interesting selections:

I, at the time, assumed (hoped?) that Jap Cars Dublin was a used car company run by a guy named Jap, but I was wrong. It is indeed a company that appears to sell primarily Japanese cars.

Cultural differences are often surprising.

In 2004 the Japanese branch of McDonald’s instituted a much-overlooked assault on Burger King’s title of having the weirdest fast food chain commercial. I present to you McDonald’s surprisingly under appreciated response: